Covering the life of Josephus Henry Barsden from his birth in 1799 through his childhood to 16 years of age, the Barsden memoirs describe events from a Sussex smugglers’ inn, a convict ship to the colony of New South Wales, sealing and whaling expeditions to Van Diemen’s Land, and Barsden’s participation in a Tahitian civil war. The author assesses the value of memoirs, and of these memoirs in particular to students of history in respect to the transnational paradigm. He tests the historicity and veracity of their contents, and provides an engaging exegesis and graphical supplement of its contents. Of central importance is Barsden’s account of the Battle of Fe’i Pi, which was in many respects the Pacific’s equivalent to the contemporaneous Battle of Waterloo, such was its lasting impact on Pacific geopolitics. This was no ordinary childhood, and poses many questions about a transnational adolescent’s impact on major events. A fascinating read for scholars and students of Australian, Pacific, and British Colonial History, written with academic rigour but accessible to non-specialists.

This volume provides the first study of the history of sinology (aka China studies) as charted across several communist states during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China was created in the first years of the Cold War, with its early history and foreign policy intimately bound up in that larger geopolitical fight. All the seismic changes in China’s geopolitical landscape—from its emergence and close relationship with the Soviet Union, to the Sino–Soviet split and the eventual rapprochement with the United States—resulted in a great deal of interest by journalists, politicians, and scholars. Yet, although scholars across the Soviet Bloc produced an impressive body of work on a range of sinological studies, with rare exceptions most of those scholars and their work remains unknown outside their own intellectual circles. This book redresses this dearth of knowledge of sinological scholarship, providing invaluable and unique glimpses of Soviet Bloc sinologists and their work during the Cold War, including cutting-edge research on lesser-studied communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and others. International in scope, this book is ideal for scholars and researchers of modern history, Chinese studies, sinology, and the Cold War.

Bringing a fresh perspective to an understudied area, this book offers a critical, source-based examination and assessment of the roles of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea (KPG) and the US during World War II in the rebirth of Korea as a nation state. Presenting original research from contemporary Korean and American sources, the first half of this book explores how the US policy regarding the independence of the Korean peninsula was articulated by the US, and how it aimed to prevent the domination of Korea by either China or the Soviets. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the US’s policy of utilizing Korean soldiers on the battlefield against Japan, and examines whether the KPG’s strategies of military diplomacy were effective or otherwise. Finally, Chapter 6 assesses the impact of the joint military training for the "Eagle Project" involving the Korean independence Army and the US Office of Strategic Services, and its impact on the development of the US-South Korea alliance. Throughout the book, parallels can be drawn from this geopolitical struggle with a more contemporary one – that between China and the US, which shows how the lessons learned in the 1940s are just as relevant to researchers and policy-makers today. This is an illuminating read for students and scholars of Korean modern history, political science and geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region more generally. The book will also appeal to public servants in the area of foreign affairs and military strategy.

This volume explores the relationship between cities and railways over three centuries. Despite their nearly 200-year existence, The City and the Railway in the World shows that urban railways are still politically and historically important to the modern world. Since its inception, cities have played a significant role in the railway system; cities were among the main reasons for building such efficient but lavish and costly modes of transport for persons, goods, and information. They also influenced the technological appearance of railways as these have had to meet particular demands for transport in urban areas. In 25 essays, this volume demonstrates that the relationship between the city and the railway is one of the most publicly debated themes in the context of daily lives in growing urban settings, as well as in the second urbanisation of the global South with migration from rural to urban landscapes. The volume’s broad geographical range includes discussions of railway networks, railway stations, and urban rails in countries such as India, Japan, England, Belgium, Romania, Nigeria, the USA, and Mexico. The City and the Railway in the World will be a useful tool for scholars interested in the history of transport, travel, and urban change.

This book provides a case study on the ongoing impact of displacement and encampment of refugees who do not have access to resettlement support services or are resettled in locations of low cultural and linguistic diversity. Following the journeys of displaced families and children who left Europe after the Second World War to seek resettlement in Queensland, Australia, this book brings together the rarely heard voices of these refugees from written archives, along with material from more than 50 oral history interviews. It thoroughly explores the impacts of displacement, encampment, and eventually resettlement in locations without resettlement facilities or support networks. In so doing, the book brings to light important findings that can be used to help understand the experiences of those impacted by contemporary refugee crises and can be considered when developing responses and assistance in locations where there is a lack of diversity or support for refugees. This book will be of interest to scholars and students studying and researching the history of migration, sociology of migration, psychological effects of migration and displacement, as well as demography. Practitioners and policymakers will also be able to draw from this book when considering the long-term impacts of responses to contemporary refugee crises.

This book adopts an innovative historical approach to Terrorism, focusing on the weaknesses of terrorist states and organizations as reflected in the ideologies, methodologies and propaganda of Russian populist, National Socialist and Islamic Terrorism. Drawing upon multilingual primary sources, the book challenges the oft repeated claim that the Nazi regime and Islamic State produced propaganda of superior quality, instead arguing that the manipulation of information is the Achilles heel of terrorist organizations. It offers a critical examination of the fears of terrorists themselves, as opposed to the traditional focus on the fear instilled by terrorist organizations in governments and citizens. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and long-term history perspective, the book provides a method for exploring the minds of terrorists and the inner workings of their organizations and traces the evolution of terrorist thought and methodology across time and place. This is the ideal volume for researchers of Terrorism within the fields of History, Politics, Security Studies, Religious Studies and Legal Studies.

In this book, some of Philip Towle’s major contributions are brought together to shed light on the Cold War and its aftermath. Topics include the build-up of chemical and nuclear weapons, the attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001, intervention in overseas conflicts and the role of the Church. The first section concentrates on the ways in which the West has interfered in conflicts around the world from the Vietnam War to Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and explains why intervention worked in former Yugoslavia but not in countries such as Vietnam, Afghanistan or Libya. The second section focuses on arms control and disarmament, how they were linked to intervention – particularly through the fear of terrorism – and how and why some arms control measures succeeded, and some did not. Intervention and Disarmament: In a Culturally Diverse World is useful for postgraduates and scholars interested in international affairs and warfare in the modern world.

"This volume of essays is an exploration of the way in which scholars from different disciplines, standpoints and theoretical orientations attempt to write life stories in the Pacific. It is the product of a conference organised by the Division of Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University in December 2005. The aim of the conference was to explore ways in which Pacific lives are read and constructed through a variety of media: films, fiction, faction, history under four overarching themes. The first, Framing Lives, sought to explore various ways of constructing a life from a classic western perspective of birth, formation, experiences and death of an individual to other ways, for example, life as secondary to a longer genealogical entity, life as a symbol of collective experience, individual lives captured and fragmented in a mosaic of others, lives made meaningful by their implication in a particular historical or cultural web, the underlying values and world views that inform one or another approach to framing a life. The second theme, the Stuff of Life, looked at materials, methods and collaborative arrangements with which the biographer, autobiographer and recorder work, their objectives, constraints, inspirations, challenges and tricks. The third section, Story Lines, focused on formats and genres such as edited diaries, collections of writings, voice recordings, genres of biography autobiography, truth and fiction (verse, dance, novels) and the varieties and different advantages of narrative shapes that crystallise the telling of a life. The final section, Telling Lives/Changing Lives, focused on biography/autobiography and the consciousness of identity, history, purpose, lives as witness and windows, telling lives as change for those involved in the tale, the telling, the listening. The overall aim was to bring out both the generic or universal challenges of telling lives as well as to highlight the particular tendencies and trends in the Pacific. Yet these four themes, which seemed analytically promising at the outset, proved in practice difficult to disentangle from the presentations at the workshop"--Provided by publisher.